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Squirrel Club crunches hard 'nuts' of science
By Zhang Qian |
July 12, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
Shanghai writer Ji Shisan founded the Science Squirrel Club of like-minded enthusiasts to help make the nuts and bolts of scientific puzzles easier for ordinary people to understand. The "squirrels" have multiplied, Zhang Qian reports.
Science is like a fruit, with a tough, external, nut-like crust. Ultimately delicious, it is hard to crack.
That's the belief of Ji Xiaohua, 31, widely known as the science writer Ji Shisan, who is determined to be the squirrel that cracks the strong crust of understanding around science, opening it so more people can appreciate its beauty.
The Science Squirrel Club, a group forum founded in April 2008 by Ji and like-minded friends, has swept the Internet and is on the way to changing perceptions of science.
How does wind form? It is because cold air and hot air weigh differently, and the heavier one prefers swirling about. Why is it difficult to knock in a nail? You haven't raised your neutral reflexes on that enough. Knock more times, and you will get better.
Science isn't necessarily boring or difficult to understand. In fact, as Ji believes, it can also be fun and interesting.
The Science Squirrel Club has attracted about 120 dedicated online members from around the world, growing from an original 10 foundation starters. Most of them range from 10 to 35 years old and include PhD students and science lovers with jobs like editors, translators or reporters.
They voluntarily write and submit interesting popular science stories to the club's Website. Its blog was listed as one of the winners of the Best Blog of Global Chinese Blogs in 2008, with the judges official comment: "They wrote from rose flowers to space ships, covering almost all the science themes; and the authors can always make it interesting and professional as well."
Ji believes that "science is beautiful, as it can trigger our unlimited imagination about the world." "To show the beauty of science with beautiful words is the main purpose of the club," he said.
The Science Squirrel Club forum founder says that he writes both traditional popular science stories and interesting and humorous ones, but the latter seem to be more popular.
He believes there are two types of readers for science stories, the science amateurs and ordinary people. The amateurs will find science information without encouragement, but as for the ordinary person, it needs to be dressed up to appeal to them.
"The interesting and humorous science books are written for ordinary people," Ji said, "I hope that they will say 'wow, I didn't know that science was so interesting' and want to explore it more."
Ji attributes the group's success partly to making science more appealing in China, though it is not a new approach in many other countries.
His interest was heightened by many interesting foreign science books like "The Selfish Gene" by British ethnologist Dawkins Richard, and he thus dreamed of becoming a writer of interesting science stories.
He took it to the next step in the autumn of 2004 when he was a humble PhD student of neurobiology at Fudan University.
On impulse, he adapted one of his essays on neurobiology into a science story, signed it "Ji Shisan" and sent it to magazine editors. He got no replies after two months and was about to give up when the editor from "Newton-Science World," a monthly magazine, responded.
The editor appreciated his potential and later published a story by Ji on time detection.
Since then, the pen name "Ji Shisan" has appeared in various science magazines, like "Newton-Science World," "New Discovery" and "Sanlian Life Week." His distinctively humorous style is popular among ordinary people who would otherwise not necessarily read about science.
Consequently his last three years at university involved doing experiments and essays by day while writing popular science stories by night.
Unlike other PhD graduates who were busy either job hunting or applying for further study overseas, Ji became a freelance popular science writer and, later, a Web editor in Beijing. After meeting similar minded friends on the Internet, they banded to establish The Science Squirrel Club.
It started modestly as an internal communications forum, then became a group blog open to the public in April last year.
"We just wanted to have a voice at first but, unexpectedly, our blog grew increasingly influential just like a rolling snow ball," Ji said.
Apart from introducing science to the public, the forum also helps provide a platform for writers to get their work published as the Website has increased in status in the popular science field.
More traffic, however, provides more work.
All volunteers
"The main 10 administrators of the blog, including me, are all volunteers but we are now working like full-time staff," Ji said. "Writers come and go. You cannot expect them to do it free forever."
To make it more sustainable, Ji transformed the club into the Squirrel Club Culture Transmission Company in early 2009.
The first book of "squirrels" was published shortly after, titled "When Colorful Voice Tastes Sweet." There are 54 popular science articles in the book collected from thousands of submissions by Squirrel Club members over the past three years.
And to fully concentrate on the running of the new company, Ji quit his Website job last April.
Apart from searching for money-making chances such as book publishing and developing projects, the company is organizing various free popular science activities for the public, introducing people to the science museum, watching science movies, and group readings.
It also recently took 32 people to the rare animal house at Shanghai Science and Technology Museum and is planning a solar eclipse observation activity.
Science is like a fruit, with a tough, external, nut-like crust. Ultimately delicious, it is hard to crack.
That's the belief of Ji Xiaohua, 31, widely known as the science writer Ji Shisan, who is determined to be the squirrel that cracks the strong crust of understanding around science, opening it so more people can appreciate its beauty.
The Science Squirrel Club, a group forum founded in April 2008 by Ji and like-minded friends, has swept the Internet and is on the way to changing perceptions of science.
How does wind form? It is because cold air and hot air weigh differently, and the heavier one prefers swirling about. Why is it difficult to knock in a nail? You haven't raised your neutral reflexes on that enough. Knock more times, and you will get better.
Science isn't necessarily boring or difficult to understand. In fact, as Ji believes, it can also be fun and interesting.
The Science Squirrel Club has attracted about 120 dedicated online members from around the world, growing from an original 10 foundation starters. Most of them range from 10 to 35 years old and include PhD students and science lovers with jobs like editors, translators or reporters.
They voluntarily write and submit interesting popular science stories to the club's Website. Its blog was listed as one of the winners of the Best Blog of Global Chinese Blogs in 2008, with the judges official comment: "They wrote from rose flowers to space ships, covering almost all the science themes; and the authors can always make it interesting and professional as well."
Ji believes that "science is beautiful, as it can trigger our unlimited imagination about the world." "To show the beauty of science with beautiful words is the main purpose of the club," he said.
The Science Squirrel Club forum founder says that he writes both traditional popular science stories and interesting and humorous ones, but the latter seem to be more popular.
He believes there are two types of readers for science stories, the science amateurs and ordinary people. The amateurs will find science information without encouragement, but as for the ordinary person, it needs to be dressed up to appeal to them.
"The interesting and humorous science books are written for ordinary people," Ji said, "I hope that they will say 'wow, I didn't know that science was so interesting' and want to explore it more."
Ji attributes the group's success partly to making science more appealing in China, though it is not a new approach in many other countries.
His interest was heightened by many interesting foreign science books like "The Selfish Gene" by British ethnologist Dawkins Richard, and he thus dreamed of becoming a writer of interesting science stories.
He took it to the next step in the autumn of 2004 when he was a humble PhD student of neurobiology at Fudan University.
On impulse, he adapted one of his essays on neurobiology into a science story, signed it "Ji Shisan" and sent it to magazine editors. He got no replies after two months and was about to give up when the editor from "Newton-Science World," a monthly magazine, responded.
The editor appreciated his potential and later published a story by Ji on time detection.
Since then, the pen name "Ji Shisan" has appeared in various science magazines, like "Newton-Science World," "New Discovery" and "Sanlian Life Week." His distinctively humorous style is popular among ordinary people who would otherwise not necessarily read about science.
Consequently his last three years at university involved doing experiments and essays by day while writing popular science stories by night.
Unlike other PhD graduates who were busy either job hunting or applying for further study overseas, Ji became a freelance popular science writer and, later, a Web editor in Beijing. After meeting similar minded friends on the Internet, they banded to establish The Science Squirrel Club.
It started modestly as an internal communications forum, then became a group blog open to the public in April last year.
"We just wanted to have a voice at first but, unexpectedly, our blog grew increasingly influential just like a rolling snow ball," Ji said.
Apart from introducing science to the public, the forum also helps provide a platform for writers to get their work published as the Website has increased in status in the popular science field.
More traffic, however, provides more work.
All volunteers
"The main 10 administrators of the blog, including me, are all volunteers but we are now working like full-time staff," Ji said. "Writers come and go. You cannot expect them to do it free forever."
To make it more sustainable, Ji transformed the club into the Squirrel Club Culture Transmission Company in early 2009.
The first book of "squirrels" was published shortly after, titled "When Colorful Voice Tastes Sweet." There are 54 popular science articles in the book collected from thousands of submissions by Squirrel Club members over the past three years.
And to fully concentrate on the running of the new company, Ji quit his Website job last April.
Apart from searching for money-making chances such as book publishing and developing projects, the company is organizing various free popular science activities for the public, introducing people to the science museum, watching science movies, and group readings.
It also recently took 32 people to the rare animal house at Shanghai Science and Technology Museum and is planning a solar eclipse observation activity.
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